Michael Winship: Man of peace still seeking Mideast miracle

Wednesday

Apr 30, 2008 at 12:01 AMApr 30, 2008 at 11:55 AM

A recent “Saturday Night Live” skit featured an ersatz Larry King (redundant, I know) interviewing former President Jimmy Carter and chastising him for writing too many books that no one ever reads, a charge with which a reluctant Carter finally agrees.

Michael Winship

A recent “Saturday Night Live” skit featured an ersatz Larry King (redundant, I know) interviewing former President Jimmy Carter and chastising him for writing too many books that no one ever reads, a charge with which a reluctant Carter finally agrees.

Unkind, but funny.

Just in time for Mom’s Day, the latest oeuvre from the compulsively prolific ex-president is “A Remarkable Mother,” the story of his mother, Lillian, or “Miz Lillian,” as just about everyone whose path she crossed called her.

My encounter with her occurred about a year or so after Jimmy Carter became president. She was guest of honor at a banquet thrown in the Grand Ballroom of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria by a national organization of rabbis and affiliated laity. We were taping an interview with her for PBS.

The rabbis were honoring Lillian Carter for her good deeds: her Peace Corps service in India (at the age of 68), work as a social and civil rights activist in the South and, of course, begetting a president of the United States.

As she accepted the award, the hundreds in attendance gave her a standing ovation. When the applause finally died down, she stood facing the crowd, waited a beat, then declared, “I’ve never seen so many Jews in my life!”

There was a long moment of stunned silence. And then the entire, vast ballroom erupted in laughter. Her unvarnished directness won them over.

Such candor, passed from mother to son, helped President Carter negotiate the 1978 Camp David Accords between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, agreements that led to the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty the following year.

Much of that success was overwhelmed by the Iranian hostage crisis that crippled his re-election bid, but the Middle East has remained an abiding interest of the ex-president, even though his activities and statements have frequently aroused the ire of the White House and State Department as well as the mockery and scorn of critics here and in Israel.

But no matter what many believe, there is value in Carter’s actions, including his much-maligned trip two weeks ago to meet with militant Hamas leaders from the West Bank, Gaza and Syria. As he reported at a conference in Jerusalem sponsored by the Israeli Council on Foreign Relations, “The problem is not that we met them, but that the U.S. and Israeli governments refuse to meet with them, making peace harder if not impossible to achieve.”

He elaborated in a Monday New York Times op-ed piece: “A counterproductive Washington policy in recent years has been to boycott and punish political factions or governments that refuse to accept United States mandates. This policy makes difficult the possibility that such leaders might moderate their policies.” Bloodshed and terrorism continue.

The State Department said that it asked Carter not to make the trip to meet with Syrian President Bashar al Assad and leaders of Hamas, which State has designated a “foreign terrorist organization.” Carter claimed that no such request was made.

The trip did, in fact, result in a series of statements from Hamas that, if true, could lead to their acceptance of a two-state solution — along 1967 borders — if approved by the Palestinian people. (There already has been some dissent about this from Hamas subordinates.) And Syria expressed to Carter its willingness to negotiate with Israel over the return of the Golan Heights, but only with the participation of the United States.

That possibility may have been derailed by last week’s intelligence revelations of an alleged attempt to build a Syrian nuclear reactor with the help of North Korea. (The site was destroyed several months ago in an Israeli bombing raid.)

On Friday, in the wake of the Hamas meetings, Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Dan Gillerman, called Carter “a bigot.” Yet, this is how Carter concluded his remarks to that conference in Jerusalem:

“The transformation of Israel in 60 years has been wonderful to behold,” he said. “The next miracle for which we should all pray is the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state that will live in peace with Israel and will cooperate with all their neighbors for the future of the region and its children.

“The Holy Land is a place of miracles. It is time for the miracle of peace.”

Michael Winship is a freelance television writer in Manhattan and president of the Writers Guild of America, East.